Modern Tales was a webcomics publisher active from 2002 to 2012, best known for being one of the first profitable subscription models for digital content. Joey Manley was the website's publisher and original editor. The site featured a roster of approximately 30 professional webcomic artists. Shaenon Garrity, one of the site's original artists, took over as the publication's editor in 2006. Other Modern Tales artists included Gene Luen Yang, James Kochalka, Dorothy Gambrell, Harvey Pekar and Will Eisner.

Joey Manley was an American LGBT fiction author, web designer, and webcomics publisher. Manley wrote the successful LGBT novel The Death of Donna-May Dean in 1992. He moved to San Francisco in 2000 in order to work in web design. Manley was the founder and publisher of the Modern Tales family of webcomics websites, which included Modern Tales, Serializer, Girlamatic, Webcomics Nation, and others. Manley is considered one of the "founding pioneers" of the webcomic movement for creating a then-revolutionary subscription model.